“I feel like the soul of writing is character, and the writers I admire the most are those who can evoke characters who are nothing like themselves.”

Myke Cole joins the show to talk about military fantasy and his fantasies about the military, his journey from IT to CIA to merc to Coast Guard to fantasy writer, his biggest nerd-out author moments, how he came up with his “Black Hawk Down Meets The X-Men” Shadow Ops series, what PTSD feels like, the importance of having a plan for crisis management, reconciling his art, politics, job, and readership, and more! Give it a listen! And go buy his Shadow Ops books, starting with Control Point!

“I take a tremendous amount of pride in being a difficult person to kill.”

Unfortunately, before you can get to it, you’ve gotta wade through nearly 15 minutes of intro! It’s almost Marc Maron-like! If you wanna get past me talking about getting stood up by a publisher and discovering that I’ve become an anecdote in a business book (as well as my Myke intro), then skip to the 14:30 mark! Now go listen to the show!

“Intelligence, at its root, is breaking the laws of other countries and stealing their shit. I understand it’s necessary, but it’s not nice and it’s not ethical.”

As a security contractor, government civilian and military officer, Myke Cole’s career has run the gamut from Counterterrorism to Cyber Warfare to Federal Law Enforcement. He’s done three tours in Iraq and was recalled to serve during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

All that conflict can wear a guy out. Thank goodness for fantasy novels, comic books, late night games of Dungeons and Dragons and lots of angst-fueled writing.

For Thanksgiving this year, I decided to eschew the regular interview-based podcast and ask all of my past guests what they’re thankful for. Since it’s a mere couple of weeks from the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, responses were all over the spectrum. Give it a listen by MP3 download or iTunes. Here’s everyone who participated (with links to their episodes of the podcast):

A few guests sent along material in addition to their written or recorded responses. Liz Hand sent a link to this video about Lincolnville, ME’s Move It! Project:

Bob Eckstein (who you oughtta follow on Twitter at @bobeckstein) sent two of his cartoons, including the one at the top of this page:

Jonathan C. Hyman’s contribution is the most involved, and requires a little unpacking. In the podcast, he says, “Despite the 2016 presidential election and the myriad social, environmental, and economic issues that have fractured our society, I am thankful that we are, and hopeful we will remain, a vibrant culture where people are free to speak openly and publicly.”

Background information and narrative: Known for his decade-long project which documents the vernacular public art, public speech, and memorial language that emerged across the United States in response to the 9/11 attacks, documentary photographer and past Virtual Memories guest Jonathan C. Hyman photographed the signage, displays, and public dialogue surrounding the 2016 presidential election.

His work on the election — including the seven images he contributed to this Thanksgiving podcast — is not meant to endorse or disparage Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, or their supporters. As a photographer with an interest in public expression — visual and speech — and in “things by the side of the road,” Hyman traveled within an approximate 150-mile radius from his home in Sullivan County, NY to areas in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.

Here, Hyman presents a sampling of the images in this series as they appeared when he came upon them. He photographed each display keeping in mind his interest in handmade objects, the American flag, and the houses, buildings, and neighborhoods people live and work in. The majority of the signs he saw, many handmade, were supportive of Donald Trump. The large majority of the handmade signs he encountered were displayed by Trump supporters on their own property. Realizing that his findings are anecdotal, Hyman says, “I have no doubt others have seen things I have not and that there were signs supporting Hillary Clinton in areas I have both visited and not traveled to. Nonetheless, it was clear to me that where pro-Hillary Clinton signs did exist, they tended to be of the more pre-fabricated, generic lawn sort and generally less likely to be on front lawns.”

In addition to being featured on the PBS NewsHour, Hyman’s work has been featured in Time Magazine, The New York Times, the Journal of American History, and several well-known European newspapers and magazines in print and online. In the fall of 2008 Hyman toured Europe as a U.S. State Department Cultural Envoy (as part of a program organized by the American embassy in Vienna and the University of Graz, Austria.), lecturing at universities in Berlin and Tuebingen, Germany, Vienna and Graz Austria, Brno, Czech Republic, and Zagreb, Croatia about his 9/11 related photographs. In addition to lecturing publicly since 2002 at well known academic institutions, from 2008-2016 Hyman was Associate Director for Conflict and Visual Culture Initiatives at Bryn Mawr College’s Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, where he also supervised the Center’s online gallery.

I really apologize for the delay, I just got married (something I’m deeply thankful for!) there’s been a lot on the plate, but then isn’t that true for everyone? Anyway, sorry.

At the moment I’m more hopeful than thankful, but one hope is that the people who voted in Trump actually did it for the reasons that they say (the economy, basically) and that what we saw at the rallies was a more a raucous party and letting off of steam then a sign of future mayhem. I hope that maybe things will calm down. Trump was a pitchman and a loudmouth for professional wrestling. He’s always said crazy shit for effect. Maybe — just maybe — things won’t go to hell. The tone in today’s NYTimes showed a guy who wasn’t hell-bent on being a hell-raiser. Of course being hopeful isn’t easy at a time like this. But maybe — just maybe — we’ll survive all of this.

I’m really thankful to be married. I found a good woman who loves me and I love in return, we shared our vows in front of friends and family at a great ceremony in a Brooklyn hotel and restaurant (the Whythe). It was a great party and I’m grateful for all of it.

I’m thankful as a comic book artist to be doing what I believe is the best work of my career….and I’m 58 years old too, so that feels miraculous! Very much so…

And even though I don’t read comics much these days I’m grateful for the medium itself, specifically underground comics, and even more specifically their greatest progenitor: R. Crumb. By never selling out he paved the way for others to do the same, and to focus on the art itself. He raised the bar for everyone — all cartoonists (who aren’t hacks!) owe him for that — Big Time!

I’m also thankful for the comix project I’m deep into right now: another memoir about childhood. It’s entitled “Chartwell Manor, a memoir in comics”. It’s about a boarding school I attended in Mendham, NJ in the early 1970s and the effect it’s had on my life. It’s shaping up really well and should be done in hopefully another year!

The thing I’m most thankful for is having such wonderful guests who are willing to pitch in to projects like this (and otherwise help keep me sane)!

We also talk about the collapsing economics of illustration, cartooning, and pretty much every other field Bob pursues, doing seven years of research on The History of the Snowman (in which he discovered some amazing stuff) and accidentally shooting down a TV project based on it, how Footnotes taught him that people’s real story isn’t always the one they think they’re telling you, his exultation at selling his very first submission to The New Yorker and his puzzlement when he didn’t sell another one there for a year, what makes for a good bookstore, the benefits of eavesdropping, and more! Now go listen to the show!

“Every bookstore is thousands of peoples’ dreams, either fulfilled or unfulfilled. Everyone’s life project is on the shelf. And it’s where people’s dreams are going to get triggered.”

Bob Eckstein is an illustrator, writer and cartoonist. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. He is also known as the world’s leading snowman expert and is the author of the holiday classic, The History of the Snowman. He lives in New York City.

“I’ve mined this little world that may or may not be exclusive to me, but it’s something that I’m interested in: the interface between country and city, between older and younger, between lifestyles. It’s an emotional and intellectual world I like probing.”

Ed Koren‘s cartoons and covers have graced The New Yorker for more than 50 years, so it was honor to record with him during CXC about his career, his perspective on generations of cartoonists, the development of his unique style (he has a good answer to my question, “Why so hairy?”), the persistence of his middle-class work ethic, his first encounter with the Undergrounds, his lithography “uptown” art, the advantages of having small ambitions, and more! Give it a listen!

“I still take enormous delight in starting and finishing and going through the uncharted seas of getting from here to there. There’s no map to get from an idea to a final culmination. (That’s what Dorothy Parker called single-panel cartoons: culminations.)”

Well also talk about why he avoids Look Day, why he left NY for the country, the challenges of satire, the significance of The New Yorker in his household, the influence of Alley Oop and the Schmoo on his work, the shrinking economics of cartooning, his “ah, animals!” moment, his interest in long novels and single-panel comics, what he had to learn and what was innate, the benefits of being an outsider, and why he pined to join the Columbus Marathon outside our hotel. Now go listen to the show!

“I keep learning new things about color, and density, and structure. With each problem that I have to deal with comes and epiphany: ‘This is how it works!’ It may be self-renewing, but each time I move ahead.”

Edward Koren has long been associated with the The New Yorker magazine, where he has published over 1000 cartoons, as well as numerous covers and illustrations. He has also contributed to many other publications, including The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, G.Q., Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Vogue, Fortune, Vanity Fair, The Nation and The Boston Globe. His illustrated books include How to Eat Like a Child, Teenage Romance and Do I Have to Say Hello (all by Delia Ephron), A Dog’s Life by Peter Mayle, Pet Peeves by George Plimpton, and The New Legal Seafoods Cookbook by Roger Berkowitz and Jane Doerfer. Thelonius Monster’s Sky-High Fly Pie was published in 2006, Oops by Alan Katz in 2008, How to Clean Your Room in 2010 and Poems I Wrote When No One Was Looking by Alan Katz in 2011. He has also written and illustrated books for children, Behind the Wheel, and Very Hairy Harry. He has also published six collections of cartoons which first appeared in The New Yorker, the most recent being The Hard Work of Simple Living.

Born in New York City, Koren attended the Horace Mann School and Columbia University. He did graduate work in etching and engraving with S.W. Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris, and received an M.F.A. degree from Pratt Institute. He was on the faculty of Brown University for many years.

Koren’s cartoons, drawing and prints have been widely exhibited in shows across the United States as well as in France, England and Czechoslovakia. He has exhibited at the Middlebury College Museum of Art, the Washington Art Association, Terry Dintenfass Gallery, the Virginia Lynch Gallery, The Luise Ross Gallery, and Big Town Gallery. His work is also in the permanent collections of the Fogg Museum, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, the Princeton University Museum, The Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University, and in the Swann Collection at the Library of Congress. A major retrospective of his work was shown at Columbia University’s Wallach Gallery in 2010, and at the University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum in the summer of 2011.

Edward Koren has received a Doctor of Humane Letters Degree from Union College, and been a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. He was Distinguished Visitor at The American Academy in Berlin, Germany in 2003.In 2007 he received The Vermont Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has been a member of the Brookfield, VT Volunteer Fire Department for 24 years. He lives in Vermont with his family.

“I have something to live for in the goal of producing this long, fascinating, convoluted, loop-de-loop, metaphysical story arc. And that’s the kind of thing that occupies me and makes my days the joyous things they are: living in this screwed-up dream-world that isolates me from the rest of the world and humanity in general.”

Jim Woodring rejoins the show to talk art, comics and the Unifactor! During a break at SPX 2016, we sat down to discuss the importance of Fantagraphics on its 40th anniversary, Jim’s move to Seattle in 1974 and his move away from there last year, camaraderie with the cartoonists of his generation, what he’d do if he was just starting out as a cartoonist today, the experience of seeing Frank in 3-D, the joys of drawing with a six-foot pen, just what Art is there for, and more! Give it a listen! And go buy his newest book, Frank In The 3rd Dimension!

“Some people say religious experiences are just in the person’s mind, but where else would they be?”

We also talk about how Jack Kirby drew like a haunted machine, why computers have led to a generation of prosthetic geniuses, why he sticks with analog drawing tools (like that six-foot-long pen, known as Nibbus Maximus), the remarkable experience of going on a tour of the South China Seas with “a billionaire friend of mine”, his relationship with the Unifactor (and the perils of trying to circumvent its storytelling imperatives), the role of perseverance in becoming a better artist, and the feeling that he’s done the right thing in his life. Now go listen to the show!

“I feel like a pretender next to guys like Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez. With my limited abilities and my ‘that’s good enough’ philosophy of art, I feel like I’ve just sneaked into the party.”

Jim Woodring was born in Los Angeles in 1952 and enjoyed a childhood made lively by an assortment of mental an psychological quirks including paroniria, paranoia, paracusia, apparitions, hallucinations and other species of psychological and neurological malfunction among the snakes and tarantulas of the San Gabriel mountains.

He eventually grew up to be an inquisitive bearlike man who has enjoyed three exciting careers: garbage collector, merry-go-round-operator and cartoonist. A self-taught artist, his first published works documented the disorienting hell of his salad days in an “illustrated autojournal” called JIM. This work was published by Fantagraphics Books and collected in The Book of Jim in 1992. A newer collection of these comics was published as Jim.

He is best known for his wordless comics series depicting the follies of his character Frank, a generic cartoon anthropomorph whose adventures careen wildly from sweet to appalling. A decade’s worth of these stories was collected in The Frank Book in 2004. The 2010 Frank story Weathercraft won The Stranger’s Genius Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for that year. Woodring has published two more FRANK books, The Congress of the Animals, and Fran. His newest book is Frank In The 3rd Dimension, with Charles Barnard.

Woodring is also known for his anecdotal charcoal drawings (a selection which was gathered in Seeing Things in 2005), and the sculptures, vinyl figures, fabrics and gallery installations that have been made from his designs. His multimedia collaborations with the musician Bill Frisell won them a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. He lives on Vashon Island with his family and residual phenomena.

“How can you keep experimenting within your own work? When they say people reinvent themselves, they just mean they put on new clothes or something.”

Ben Katchor rejoins the show to talk about the 25th anniversary edition of Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay (Drawn & Quarterly)! We talk about those aforementioned pleasures, the boredom of the modern flaneur, his evolution from genre fandom to “literary comics” (my awful term, not his), the danger in comics becoming over-academic, the challenges of writing a world history, and more! Give it a listen! And go buy Cheap Novelties!

“You spend the first 20 years of your life figuring out how the culture works, another 20 years figuring out how to make a living in that culture, and maybe the last part you’re in oblivion, saying, ‘What did I do?'”

We also get into the tedium of the latest iteration of New York City, the experience of capitalism’s end-game, why his comics are a product of a unique moment, his discovery of Undergrounds, the challenges of making anything new, how he found a readership that isn’t interested in comics, and more! Now go listen to the show!

“All these people who weren’t born or were babies when Cheap Novelties came out, now they’re going to look at it and say, ‘What does this mean? How does this even relate to us?'”

Ben Katchor lives in New York, where he is an Associate Professor at Parsons School of Design—The New School. As director of Parsons’ Illustration program, he runs The New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium, a weekly lecture series for the study of text-image work. He has been the recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Along with his long-running comic-strip work — Julius Knipl, Real-Estate Photographer, The Cardboard Valise, Hotel & Farm, The Jew of New York, and a monthly strip for Metropolis magazine—Katchor has also collaborated with musician Mark Mulcahy on a number of works for musical theatre. These works include The Rosenbach Company (a tragi-comedy about the life and times of Abe Rosenbach, the preeminent rare-book dealer of the 20th century); The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, or, The Friends of Dr. Rushower, an absurdist romance about the chemical emissions and addictive soft-drinks of a ruined tropical factory-island; A Checkroom Romance, about the culture and architecture of coat-checkrooms; and Up From the Stacks, about a page working the stacks of the New York Public Library in 1975. Katchor is the only cartoonist to have won an Obie for Best New American Work, for his libretto and drawings for The Carbon Copy Building, a collaboration with Bang on a Can. His TED Talk is titled Comics of Bygone New York. He is on Twitter at benkatchor.

“Frank Modell told me, ‘For the New Yorker, you have to draw better than you know how to.'”

Liza Donnelly joins the show to talk about her careers as a New Yorker cartoonist, women’s rights activist and live-drawing legend! We get into the weird overlap of respectability, responsibility and cartooning, as well as her work for Cartooning for Peace, the joys of drawing on the subway, how she benefited from Tina Brown’s love of snarky women, why she’s considering (but is daunted by) making a long-form comic, the evolution of her feminist consciousness, her trouble drawing George Clooney, and more! BONUS: my interminable intro takes up the first 13 minutes!Give it a listen!

“Social media is an extension of what drew me to cartooning initially; I was shy and I didn’t like to talk, and I was drawing to make my mother laugh. Drawing was communication, and sharing.”

We also get into the significance of The New Yorker (and New York), her book on the magazine’s women cartoonists, the TED swag that changed her life, the mentor/mentee relationship, the contradictions of meticulously developing a carefree style, how the internet has given her a platform, and more. Now go listen to the show!

“It becomes a matter of paring back your style, learning how to let go of detail, learning how to draw simply, making it look like you just whipped this drawing off, even if it took 25 attempts.”

Liza Donnelly is a writer and cartoonist with The New Yorker magazine. She is also a sought after public speaker and also does live drawings of events, covering the 2016 Democratic National Convention for CBS News and the presidential debates. She recently joined CBS This Morning as contributing cartoonist. She is a columnist and cartoonist for Forbes.com, specializing in politics and women’s rights. Donnelly draws a political cartoon for Politico and Medium, and she is a contributor to many other national publications. Donnelly was a finalist for the 2014 Thurber Prize, the only award for written humor in the United States.

Donnelly is a Cultural Envoy for the US State Department, traveling around the world speaking about freedom of speech, cartoons and women’s rights. As a public speaker, Donnelly has also spoken at TED (Technology Entertainment and Design), the United Nations, and The New Yorker Festival, as well as colleges, universities and corporate venues, among other places.

Donnelly was profiled on CBS Sunday Morning, NBC and BetterTV, and has been interviewed on radio and in numerous magazines, newspapers and online. Donnelly’s cartoons and commentary can be seen on various websites: the NewYorker.com; Politico.com, CNN.com; HuffingtonPost.com; Salon.com; DailyBeast.com; NarrativeMagazine.com. Her work has appeared in print publications, including The New York Times, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, The Nation and The Harvard Business Review.

She is the New York Director of the international project, Cartooning for Peace, helping to promote understanding through humor; and is president and co-founder of USA FECO, the US chapter of the international cartoonists’ organization. Her work has been in numerous exhibitions globally, and she has curated exhibits of international cartoonists, here and abroad. Donnelly taught at Vassar College and the School of Visual Arts and is a member of PEN and the Authors Guild. She is the recipient of an honorary degree from the University of Connecticut, and received a Ruben Award, the Salon St. Just International Prize, AAUW Women of Distinction Award. Liza was a member the jury of the World Press Cartoon Prize in Lisbon, the Cartooning for Peace Prize in Geneva and the Aydin Dogan Cartoon Competition in Turkey.

She can be found on twitter and Instagram at @lizadonnelly. She lives in Rhinebeck and New York City with her husband, New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin. They have two daughters.

We also get into how absurdism insulates him from this modern world, the impact of Brexit on British culture, why his humor was always a tough sell in the UK, the paradox of political cartoonists’ work being bought by the politicians they ridicule, the joy of ukulele, the experience of having his work knocked off by other artists, the time he got a Cartier commission, and more. Now go listen to the show!

“European culture is important to me. Having that snatched away by Brexit, well, that’s something no one discussed in any of the debates.”

“I love finding people who are obsessed with things. People who devote their lives to things are my obsession.”

Writer and Twitter provocateur Hayley Campbell joins the show for a conversation about her inability to describe her job (don’t call her a “content provider”). We talk about growing up in comics royalty (her dad is the great cartoonist Eddie Campbell), Alan Moore’s magic tricks, nearly losing a comic-shop job because of her lack of a college degree, the celebrity retweet she’s proudest of, and having an accidental career path, no fixed home, and a traumatic brain injury that gooses with her memory (and whether those three things are somehow connected). Also, we get into how she recently embarrassed Jonathan Safran Foer, and more! Give it a listen! And go buy her first book, The Art of Neil Gaiman (Ilex/Harper). And for God’s sake, go follow her on Twitter!

We also get into her obsession with obsessives, becoming the oldest person at her BuzzFeed office in her early 30s, the insanely creepy Moebius comic she read as a kid, the glories of Australian dentistry, digging through old girlie magazines to research her book on Neil Gaiman, and why she loves writing about boxing. We also compare notes on doing interviews with people whose work you love. Now go listen to the show!

“Dad won’t join Twitter because he’s afraid I’ll have more followers than him, and he’ll be ‘Hayley Campbell’s dad.'”

“I think I made three cartoons about Jane Austen before I got around to reading a Jane Austen novel. And then I thought, ‘Oh, this is really good!'”

Cartoonist & illustrator Tom Gauld joins the show to talk about his new book, Mooncop (Drawn & Quarterly), and developing a post-optimistic view of the future. We get into his drawing and storytelling influences, how he got a weekly gig doing literary gags at The Guardian, why he likes doing illustration work, the time he melted down when he met his comics-idols, how he got his first New Yorker cover, the two key elements of productivity for all artists and writers (coffee & walking) and more! Give it a listen! And go buy Mooncop! (and his other books, Goliath and You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack!)

“I never tailored my work to an audience, other than just trying to make what I think is funny.”

We also get into the importance of the hand-drawn line, the question of collaborating with a writer, the balance of long-form comics and weekly assignments, his schoolteacher’s rapprochement with his compulsive cartooning, the challenge of doing literary comics while trying not to read too deeply, the scope-creep of doing the cover for the Drawn & Quarterly 25th anniversary collection, why weaknesses are as important as strengths to one’s style, and why he REALLY needs to learn to draw hands. Now go listen to the show!

“The constraints of illustration work are actually liberating. . . . I think I’d go crazy if I had to draw comics all the time.”

Tom Gauld was born in 1976 and grew up in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He is a cartoonist and illustrator and his work is regularly published in The Guardian, The New York Times, and The New Scientist. His comic books, Mooncop, Goliath, and You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, are published by Drawn & Quarterly. He lives in London with his family.